A lack of Y, not lack of 'Why?'

Saturday

Sep 29, 2007 at 12:42 AM

By this time tomorrow, some other coach will have gone off on the media or some celebrity will have been arrested, or forgotten to wear underwear when she went dancing, and YouTube's biggest hit won't be Oklahoma State football coach Mike Gundy's rant.

Lori Gilbert

By this time tomorrow, some other coach will have gone off on the media or some celebrity will have been arrested, or forgotten to wear underwear when she went dancing, and YouTube's biggest hit won't be Oklahoma State football coach Mike Gundy's rant.

The sting of his performance will remain, though.

At least it will for a woman who has spent 27 years covering sports and views his public rebuke of a columnist as a personal attack on a woman more than on a sports journalist.

For those who have managed to avoid the hissy fit thrown by Gundy after his team's win over Texas Tech a week ago, he spent the entirety of his postgame news conference attacking Jenni Carlson, columnist for The Oklahoman, for her game-day opinion piece that questioned the toughness of Bobby Reid, the Cowboys' benched quarterback.

Gundy, who stopped just short of foaming at the mouth, directed his attack at Carlson's lack of a Y chromosome as much as her right to ask Why?

"A mother brought this to me," Gundy began, as though any woman, whose natural role is to be mothering and caring, would have to be out of her mind to voice such critical, un-nurturing remarks.

Later, as he questioned the credibility of the piece and genesis of it, Gundy told Carlson, "You obviously don't have a child."

Again, the message is clear. You're a woman, and a woman's, and by extension, a mother's, role is to protect and defend a child, not criticize. That's a man's job, little lady.

It's a safe bet Gundy never would have taken a male reporter to task in the fashion he attacked Carlson.

Screaming, "You're obviously not a father" to a man holds no bite.

To question a woman's ability or decision to bear children is much more personal.

That's what is so disheartening about Gundy's attack.

Rather than rationally defending his decision, and the quarterback he benched, Gundy set out to embarrass a woman.

It's no comfort to me to know that other women working in this field undergo the same insulting offensive personal attacks that I experience on a routine basis.

Conversations with female colleagues and members of the Association for Women in Sports Media are a constant reminder of the backlash we experience.

It's that the attack has come, not from anonymous bloggers and callers, but from a source who ought to know better.

I thought we'd left behind the Sam Wyches of the world, who sought to ban a female reporter from his Cincinnati Bengals locker room in 1990, five years after the NFL rules prohibited barriers.

A football coach at a football factory like Big 12 member Oklahoma State ought to expect that every move he makes is subject to scrutiny and debate. If folks from one end of Oklahoma to the other didn't care why the Cowboys benched Reid in favor of Zac Robinson, Gundy wouldn't be making $850,000 a year.

Carlon's job is to offer her opinion, based on her reporting and the insights she's gleaned doing her job.

Maybe she got it wrong. Maybe the incidents she chronicled in her story about Reid don't add up to his being a wimp. To her, however, they did. That's what she wrote. That's what The Oklahoman pays her - considerably less than $850,0000 a year - to do.